Developers are moving from supporting the front office to being the front office, according to Tim Vanderham, the head of development for IBM Bluemix and IBM Cloud Marketplace. This transition is a result of API economy and means that APIs now power the modern digital supply chain that is brought together by the cloud.

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"There is a disruption happening in the global businesses," said Vanderham at the DeveloperWeek conference in San Francisco. Enterprise architects are either facing that disruption or causing it for others.

Application development is about speed and choice. "If you are writing applications, you should be able to leverage the knowledge and tools you have today and find these in the development platform you choose," Vanderham explained. A good design has to have clean interfaces that make it possible to iterate on certain parts of a solution in combination. Enterprise architects need to think about building composable applications and businesses. This requires thinking about how application developers want to compose APIs.

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Application Programming Interfaces (API) have helped my organization by allowing us to create custom and thriving partner ecosystems. This allows for customer and partner ecosystems to emerge through the API which in turn leads to improved relationships with our sutures and increased revenue due to the spread of the grown partnered ecosystems. API's multiplying reach is a great benefit for our organization as it spreads our message and helps with branding.

As "pipelining" of apps and use of data becomes more and more prevalent, we have to both be sure that the API's are robust enough to allow for those data transformations and pipelining, and to also make sure that sensitive data doesn't cross over into spaces where it is not only not needed, but would make users vulnerable to attack. Thinking deviously helps to expose ways in which the devious might exploit us.